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A closer look at using Oracle Solaris

Automounted Home Directory

If you're running a fresh installation of Solaris 11 Express (as opposed to an upgrade from OpenSolaris), you'll notice your home directory is now at the more appropriate /home/<username>, instead of /export/home/<username>.

In reality, the data for your home directory still resides at /export/home/<username>, it's just that the directory has been automounted for you at /home/<username>. This is configured in the file /etc/auto_home:

A big benefit of automating your home directory is that it now becomes very easy to relocate the location of the storage behind the directory. Say, for example, the rpool, in which the home directory is stored by default, starts running out of space. By changing the automount location, we can relocate our home directory to another disk, or even network attached storage (which would make it accessible from any instance of Solaris).

For this example I'm simply going to relocate my home directory to another disk I have available on the machine.

After the copying of the data, zfs unmount rpool/export/home/username, zfs set mountpoint=/export/home/username newpool/home/username, make sure everything is working correctly, then zfs destroy rpool/export/home/username.